Passions in Poetry Don't submit any poems. They will never be removed Colon, Michigan

Ms. Anonymous's complaint is essentially correct, albeit with two minor corrections.

As reported, we assuredly do NOT remove forum threads without very good cause, certainly not simply because someone wants them gone. This is, in fact, part of the Terms of Service that Ms. Anonymous agreed to when she joined the community. In our TOS, we explain in some detail why we feel this policy is justified.

I'd like to summarize the pertinent points from our TOS:

"When you joined the pipTalk forums and clicked that 'I Agree' button, you granted us publishing rights to the work you decide to post. You own the copyright, but submitting it to a forum gives us nonexclusive right to publish it in perpetuity.

"Of equal importance to the publishing rights granted is the open invitation issued. When you post to a forum you are implicitly asking all of the other Members of the community to comment. The instant someone accepts that invitation and posts a reply to your work, the thread becomes a collaborative effort. You still own your material and, as far as pipTalk is concerned, always will. You do not, however, own the thread within which you decided to post it. The thread belongs to everyone.

"... deleting a thread doesn't just remove the originating post, but also removes all of the comments. The people who replied to the work , investing their time and good will, find their efforts unappreciated and unvalued by the very person who invited them to participate.

"Publishing on the Internet isn't greatly different from publishing in the real world. You can't expect a book or magazine publisher to recall your work after it's gone to the printers. What you say in real life can't simply be unsaid. Decisions made are decisions you will live with the rest of your life.

"Think before you post and make darn sure you can be as proud of your words in five years as you were when you wrote them. You are creating a legacy and should treat it as such."

As anyone can readily see, Ms Anonymous's complaint is fully addressed in our Terms of Service. We don't make our policies a big secret.

CORRECTION #1: This complaint has been lodged against Passions in Poetry, but in truth Passions in Poetry comprises much more than just the forums at http://piptalk.com. Our forums represent a community of writers and we insist each and every member extend respect and tolerance for every other member. That is why individual don't get to decide willy nilly to delete threads where others have participated.

The same policy, however, does not hold true at the other Passions in Poetry web sites.

The main site, at http://www.netpoets.com, is NOT a community of writers, but rather is open to the general, reading public -- to the tune of over 180,000,000 visitors since 1998. We very rarely get requests for deletions at the main site, but when we do we always honor them.

CORRECTION #2: Ms Anonymous stated that our forums contain over 77,000 poems, a number that is grossly inaccurate.

As I write this, our database in fact contains 272,298 threads, the vast majority of which are poems. Within those threads, there are 2,555,983 individual comments, which once again underscores exactly WHY we have a publicly posted policy against deleting a thread that has -- at the implicit invitation of the author -- become a collaborative effort of the entire pipTalk community.